The distinct art of Sarai Sherman

The club was formed as an exclusive enclave for African American men, but it held a pre-eminent art exhibition every year that welcomed African American and white female artists. Like the Harmon Foundation, it gave them a venue for their works when most would not.

The last 64 years have wiped away the memory of that Pyramid Club show, but Sherman, now 89, does recall some of the many other exhibitions she’s had in her very long career. I wrote about her and the other women artists from that catalog because I was curious about what had happened to them. Some of the men went on to make a name for themselves but many of the women seemed to have disappeared.

Sherman’s son Nick came across my blog post and put me in touch with his mother, who lives in New York and is still painting. Given the name Sarai (she figured it was taken from the Bible), she grew up in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, and started painting as early as elementary school. She was so good at it that she was permitted to attend classes at an art graphics school elsewhere in the city.

“When I was in the fourth or fifth grade, they gave me Fridays off,” she said. “I’d leave school and go down to that art graphics school. … I drew everything,” focusing mostly on nature. “I was more interested in the ambiance – nature, the city, people, places.”

At Kensington High School, she was asked to create a mural for an outside wall. She’s not quite sure of the subject matter – it was a long time ago and the mural is likely long gone – but “it must’ve been some sort of portrayal of what Philadelphia looked like.”

Sherman was attending school at a time when some of the nation’s most accomplished artists were teaching children (and painting murals themselves) in the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration. She recalled having teachers who were “very interesting and enthusiastic about everything. … They were mainly happy that they had a job,” she said.

She chose to study art on a scholarship at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art headed by a Russian-born artist named Boris Blai, who offered what she called “an intercultural curriculum. You studied art but at the same time you had … music, dance, literature.” She took classes five days a week 9 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon from teachers who came up from the college’s main campus.

“I started doing sculpture at Tyler because Blai was a sculptor,” she said. “Tyler had a great kiln. We were free to do whatever we wanted to do.”

Artist Earl Horter taught graphics and Honga Holm taught dance.

After five years at Tyler, she went off to the University of Iowa, deciding afterward that she didn’t want to teach. “I wanted to be an artist,” she said.

So she moved to New York and designed fabric, wallpaper, “anything three-dimensional and sculpted,” along with continuing her painting. Her works were sold to home furnishing companies in Philadelphia and New York. “I decided that I could be a designer and not a teacher,” she said.

In the 1940s when her husband was stationed at an air base in Eagle Pass, TX, she painted a historical mural of African American soldiers on their mess-hall walls. She doesn’t clearly remember the exact subject matter, but Nick recalled his father mentioning that it was the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the Buffalo Soldiers of the U.S. 10th Calvary Regiment, along with scenes from the American Revolution.

“Adjoining the base was an infantry training base where a segregated, black transport battalion was stationed,” said Nick. “My mother was visiting for some months and somehow my father (who was the provost marshal) got permission for her to do some frescoes in the black enlisted-men’s mess, which I gather was in bad shape. So she did these murals which, needless to say, caused a bit of a stir and were part of the reason some officers’ wives tried to get my mother banned from the officer’s club.”

Nick said his mother – “a leftist, Jewish woman artist who dressed funny” – was also friendly with Mexican Americans in the town. “And like with everything else the color line ran down the middle of everything that happened in the area,” he said.

In 1952, she won a Fulbright Scholarship to study and paint in Italy, spending six weeks in Umbria learning Italian (a requirement of the scholarship) and later sharing an apartment in Rome with other scholars who were art historians.

“It was far more stimulating and far more adaptive for women and men, which was not the case in the United States,” she said. She mentioned the artist Georgia O’Keefe as a female who had breached the ceiling, but overall, “women were not involved professionally.”

One of Sherman’s prized works in Italy was a mural that ended up as a three-dimensional foldout in a book titled “Camera Picta: Sarai Sherman,” published collaboratively in the 1990s.

She painted the mural on the walls of an 18th-century barn that her friends and patrons the Guzzettis had converted into a spartan family chapel. Nick said his mother used frescoes to  depict the couple, and also included “the theme of sheep both as the biblical ‘flock’ and also perhaps lambs to the slaughter.”

Said Sherman, “It was a story of what was going on politically and socially at the time.”

When she returned to this country after two years, Sherman was represented by the ACA Galleries in New York – “the only one that took women seriously,” she recalled. On its website, ACA said that since its beginning, it has exhibited women, African American, Chinese, Jewish, Russian and Latin American artists.

The art world was all ablaze with the notion of abstract expressionism, a form to which she did not subscribe. “I wasn’t a realist,” she said. “I was me.” She took a step beyond realism, she explained, interpreting the political uprisings and turmoil she was seeing in Italy and the United States in her own way.

For me, her paintings have an undefined quality to them, an out-of-focus look that it definitely not realism but a blurred view of actuality.

She also painted popular culture. She said she did three paintings on the death of Marilyn Monroe, who died in 1962. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin became subjects of her works. She’s done public art, like the marble sheep grazing on the front lawn of a state office complex in Waterbury, VT. Artist Raphael Soyer became a double then-and-now portrait.

Sherman returned to Italy quite often over the years. She continued her industrial designing, creating ceramics, vases, plates and saucers for companies there for 10 to 15 years. She still has an apartment in Rome.

I came across a 1958 interview in the women’s section of an Aiken, SC, newspaper during her early designing years. Described as an “attractive young brunette,” she noted that working women needed items that were both elegant and easy. She also had an interesting answer to a question of why wives need to work:

“If someone pays you in America, that means you’re needed. Money has become a symbol, showing we’re necessary. If a man is 50 years old and has $50,000, he’s very desirable. But if a woman is 50 years old and has $50,000, she’s still 50 years old. She needs to work to recapture this feeling that she’s desirable. And there’s not a man in America who wants his wife to go backward.”

Her paintings are in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art (which included her oil-on-canvas “Bear Cat” in an exhibition of its recent acquisitions in 1960-1961) and the Hirschhorn Museum (whose benefactor Joseph Hirschhorn bought 17 of her works, she said). Black and white photos of her paintings are in the Walter Rosenblum photography collection at the Smithsonian.

“I have a big painting on my easel now,” Sherman said. “I haven’t touched it in a year.” She was waylaid with a broken hip caused by a fall, and then her husband became ill and died in his sleep.

She said the painting showed a field of poisonous mushrooms – something that has always interested her – intermixed with helmets. Nick said the painting was about war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and showed soldiers’ helmets among large mushrooms. She’s working on another that is a “series of small canvasses mounted in a frame so they can spin around, kind of like the letters on Wheel of Fortune,” he said. “They will depict portraits (from photographs) of young soldiers – mainly women, black Latino and white – on one side and possibly skulls on the other side.”

“The (mushroom) painting is at a very good point,” she said. “It’s quite interesting.”

Click on the first photo below to start the gallery.

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